


Peace At What Price?

by Porphyrios



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Established Relationship, Heavy Angst, Horror, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-11-02 02:37:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20593481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Porphyrios/pseuds/Porphyrios
Summary: Nate asks Hancock if he's willing to do anything to help him, and Hancock unwisely says yes.Note: major character death.





	Peace At What Price?

"Hancock!" came the call from the balcony on the screen of the Starlight. Of fucking course. Why does Nate always want me when he's in these moods? It's like there's a switch in his brain that gets flipped as soon as he gets drunk and moody that says 'hey, I know, let's see if we can ruin Hancock's day'. He sits around moping, starts drinking, and then hey blammo, it's like he decides 'let's drag old Hancock into the mix to see if he can cheer me up', or maybe 'help me mope', and occasionally 'fuck me into the floor'... and yeah, that last one is why I always respond, even though I know the odds are against me. I'm a gambler, what can I say?

I got upstairs and I realized immediately that this is going to be a bad one. He's spent the past few days squirreled away in his room with a stack of seriously weird old books he got from somewhere, which is usually a bad sign. But looking around, this particular episode is going to be extra crappy. Nobody else is even in the area, so clearly he's thrown the usual settler crowd out. Pretty sunset turning the sky rose and gold, nice temperature out here, no bugs... this place should be swarming with the farmers and crafters all taking a break, kicking back with a beer, but no. Just Nate, sitting in the corner like a broody rock, glaring at his whiskey bottle. That creepy jagged half-sword he found somewhere is leaning against the wall beside him, never out of his reach. He's a handsome bastard when he's not looking like someone shot his dog, all dark hair and broody Latin eyes, but shot dog is what we've got at the moment. Seems like it's gotten a lot worse since he showed up with that sword one day, but that's just me being superstitious again. Fine, guess I'll try my happy clown shtick, see if I can salvage something out of this. Days like this I really wonder why I left Goodneighbor. I pop a grape mentat to freshen my breath and lighten my load. Ahhhhhh... now that's a rush, everything gets all sweet and swirly. Poor Nate, now I feel bad for him.

"Hey, hey, hey... why the long face?" I swagger in, doing my best impression of a Gunner with a 10 inch cock, but he's not having it... barely even looks up. Not a word from the rock, just pours another shot of whiskey and pushes it over the table at me. Damn, he's got it baaaaad. I take the shot but don't drink it. Whiskey and grape, not a flavor combination you want if you're not interested in seeing what you had for lunch again. "OK, so tell ol' Hancock what's got you in the dumps today." I leaned forward, tried my best to look attentive and interested and not just here for a quick hump. Not that it was usually very quick... or just a hump. Well. I wouldn't say what we had was a relationship, exactly, but... it's complicated. Focus, ghoul, focus. I blinked my eyes at him, knowing how weird that looked now that they were solid black.

"It's all gone to shit, Hancock." Nate growled, ignoring my theatrics completely. "Too many players, too much firepower here." Gambler or not, I had clearly rolled snake eyes on this one... it was 'unpick Nate's cryptic comments' day, one of my least favorite games of all time, with bonus prizes including 'mad when you don't read my mind and understand immediately' and 'I might cry like a baby if you say the wrong thing'. Fuck. My. Half-life.

"So... I'm guessing the Brotherhood and the Institute are getting ready to start their rumble for real, then?" I was playing my cards safe. That little insight was common knowledge from anyone smarter than a mirelurk. I unobtrusively slipped a tin of real mentats out and ate two of them... I was going to need all the help untangling this ball of yarn that I could get. I sighed as my grape-flavored sweet place dissolved in my head under the metallic tang of brain candy.

"Not just them." He snarled, waving his glass for emphasis and sloshing whiskey on the table. "The Minutemen are stronger than they have been since Becker. I did that. The Railroad are loaded for bear now. I fucking did that too. Brotherhood has a huge goddamn warbot armed with nukes. Yep, me again." He glared around himself, like people were just going to melt out of the shadows and attack him. "Everything I try to do to help ends up fucking it up worse." Oh boy... this again. Nate has a hero complex bigger than anything in the world except his own martyr complex. He thinks he can do anything, but he always has these totally unreasonable ideas about how people are going to behave once he does whatever it is. He just wants to help people, right? So he agrees to do whatever cock-and-bull thing they ask him to do, no matter how unreasonable it is or how likely it is he will die horribly just trying. Then the lunatic goes out and does it! And not just once... consistently. But then he's always amazed that there are consequences, like it never occurred to him that life doesn't just wrap itself up in a 'happily ever after' fairytale knot after he kills the dragon or saves the town or whatever it is. "Desdemona is on the war path, wants me to blow up the Brotherhood's blimp. Maxson wants me to help them round up and execute the Railroad as an appetizer for the Institute. Preston's too polite to say anything, but Ronnie and the rest of the Minutemen council are screaming bloody murder about the Institute and Brotherhood strike teams both. Just seems like it's all coming to a head."

"Oh." I hadn't really thought about this in depth before. In fact, I spend most days trying not to think about anything in depth; too many bad memories, too many regrets and if onlys and sour yesterdays. Today, though, the Mentats were forcing me to run the numbers, and he was right. I didn't see a way out without a serious throw down. "What's the Institute's take on all this? Is there any way they could step it back, maybe sign a peace treaty, or....?" Nate's snort cut me off.

"Those arrogant pricks think they are completely safe, and that there's no possible way any danger from the Commonwealth could reach them in their sterile little fortress. The most I ever got out of Shaun was some comments about 'collateral damage' and 'starting over'." That... didn't sound promising. My mental calculations seemed to find that even more disturbing than I did. This is why I hate mentats. You find yourself thinking things you would never think, feeling things you wouldn't normally feel because of thoughts you wouldn't normally have. Plus, as if that wasn't enough, your mouth tastes like you've been licking fusion cores.

"Starting over?" I asked, warily. Repeating Nate back to himself was a good way to set him off in this mood, and I'd rather not deal with a tantrum.

"Yeah," he snapped, but didn't seem mad at me. Cool, crisis averted this time. "I'm so ashamed that that heartless... thing... came from me I can't even stand it! Shaun is more dismissive than PAM about people dying. He thinks that the settlers and everyone else here in the Commonwealth are 'irreparably tainted'," he said, with exaggerated air quotes, "and that they need to be, in his words, 'cleansed'. Which I guess means exterminated, just fucking slaughtered, that's usually what that meant back in my time." Nate dropped his head to the table, then banged it once against the metal surface. "How has it been so long and we're still doing the same stupid shit over and over again?"

"Nature of the beast, man... nature of the beast." Now I was on safer ground. As the mayor of Goodneighbor, I could tell Nate about human nature for hours. Nobody had seen more of the monkey that still lived in our minds than me. "When there's more than one big monkey standing, each one is gonna slap the others around until one of them whips the rest for good. Only one monkey per troupe, or tree, or whatever." I put on my best wise mayor face. Haven't gotten to use that one lately, don't want to get rusty.

Nate raised his head and looked at me accusingly. "You don't even know what a monkey is." Even drunk Nate can be surprised, apparently.

"I read, asshole." Maybe I can turn this into a...

"Anyway." Nope. Shit. "The way I see it is... is..." He wandered off for a moment. I eyed the level of whiskey in the bottle, wondering if it had started out full. Nate's brain finally got its feet back under it after losing traction for a second. "There can't be a winner. But they're all gonna fight. None of them are strong enough to take out the other three, but they can sure fuck up everything from the Glowing Sea to Far Harbor trying." He shook his head slowly, staring at the table like there were answers there. "It's exactly like it was before the war. Exactly. This particular kind of stupidity is why everything is the way it is now." He looked up and... holy shit, was Nate crying? The General of the Minutemen and sworn messiah of every faction in the whole territory was sitting here on a balcony in the twilight, crying like a kid whose parents just died. Fuck. This was new. I'm all about new, but this wasn't quite what I had in mind.

"Nate. Man, come on." I slid around the table uncomfortably, put an arm around him. I wasn't very good at the comforting game, but I knew he wouldn't take any of the chemical assists I used for these moments. I felt a weird shiver when I sat next to that sword, like I always do. God I hate that damn thing. Who makes a weapon that looks like that, anyway? "Just go to bed, it will all look better in the sunshine. Maybe we can figure out a way to..." I was surprised when he looked up, especially at the look on his face. He looked haunted.

"Hancock... if you had a way to... to stop it all. To keep any of them from ruining it for everyone. Would you? Would you do it? Even if it was... if it was hard? Really hard?" Nate's eyes were fixed on me, really staring at me, but it didn't bother me like it did from most people. Nate had never made a big deal about my ghoulish face. Then again, he didn't act like this, either.

"Yeah, hell yeah, I'd do it. Save the world, what's not to like? Be a hero all over again. You've figured something out?" I'd agree to anything at this point, though I had extensive experience in the quality of 'solutions' dreamed up by drunk people at the bottom of a shot glass. If it would get him to go to bed and sleep it off, I'd agree to try to fly, as long as I could wait until tomorrow when he was sober to do it.

"I..." now he had a cagey look. This was familiar territory. I've seen so many drunks in my life, and all of them thought they were suddenly brilliant when the bottle got involved. "Maybe. I don't know." He leaned over against me and looked up at my face, closer than he ever got when we weren't in one of our infrequent marathons in bed. "If you had to help... help me do something really hard, but knew that it would fix it. This mess. Bring peace. Would you?" He leaned even closer and I could smell the whiskey on his breath, along with something even more sour, a bitter, strange smell I'd never smelled before. "Would you, Hancock?"

"Yeah," I said, not sure what was going on. "Whatever you need me to do, I can do it." I slid my hand down his back, feeling the solid muscles under the leather jacket he was wearing. I decided to be a little more daring. "You know me, I'm up for anything." I was profoundly disappointed when he pulled away, but at least he looked pleased.

"Good." He clapped me on the back. "You're a good friend, Hancock." He struggled to his feet and grabbed his sword almost like a cane. As soon as he touched it, his eyes got a little weird somehow. "Grab your gear, we need to hit the road tomorrow." He headed off towards the stairs at a determined lurch, and I wondered momentarily if he would end his career with a broken neck at the bottom of them. Not the way for a hero to go.

"Tomorrow?" What the hell? "Where are we going?"

"There's a place we need to go. I'll show you. Just get your stuff and be ready for a few days on the road." Waving, he turned around and headed down the stairs, clutching the rail with one hand and his sword with the other, like he expected to be attacked on the stairs. I wondered just what the hell I'd gotten myself into this time. I figured he wouldn't remember much of this, or if he did, we could laugh it off.

=

He did remember, and there was no laughter. We barely got breakfast in us before he shouldered a big pack full of junk and headed off, yelling at me to keep up.

Several days of travel later, and I was seriously bored and getting pissed. We had dodged the ruins of Malden and a fortress made of trash that seemed to have pretty much every Gunner left alive inside it. We had also pretty much fought, run from or eluded everything the Commonwealth had to offer in terms of danger, from bloatfies to deathclaws, ferals to supermutants. I kept expecting Nate to want to follow his usual patterns, fight everything that he could fight and loot everything he could loot, but I was traveling with a different man than the one I had known for so long. He made it clear he would rather avoid a fight than have one. Even stranger, he wouldn't use his sword, relying instead on a modified pistol I had only seen him use to shoot out spotlights and turrets. Strangest of all, he didn't stop to loot once, other than spare ammo from anything we killed that used guns. I was feeling seriously adrift, wondering who this stranger was and what he had done with the man I'd traveled with all over the Commonwealth.

Nate's pack was already full of strange things, including a couple of books... not just comics either, but real leather bound books. God knows where he found them. I didn't know what else was in there, but he was unusually bad company, sticking himself into the books every time we paused to rest. I brought my usual comfort bundle of recreational pharmaceuticals, but even so I was used to chat around the fire, not sitting with someone fixated on a book who wouldn't speak ten words. Other than read, the only thing he would do is clean that damn sword. White sand, black sand, some slop he made with boiled plants... over and over. How he wasn't ruining the blade was a mystery to me, not that it didn't look ruined anyway. Oddly, it seemed to be getting sharper and shinier, kind of an oily sheen on it, not affected at all by the scouring. 

The thing that irritated me most was that Nate also fixed some sort of herbal slop every morning and night and drank it. It stank to high heaven, and I recognized the smell of it from his breath that night in the Drive In bar. "Some new drug?" I asked him. "Can I get a hit? What does it do?" Although if it was what was turning him into an anti-social bastard, I didn't want any, thanks. Sharing is caring, though, right? Maybe the high was worth it. Coming from a guy who took a drug that turned him into a ghoul just for a buzz, hook me up, man!

He shook his head mulishly. "No, not a drug. It's a... medicine. You don't need it." He carefully drank his dose and then poured the rest out. Fine, asshole. Be like that. Any other attempts to speak were ignored. Medicine or not, he seemed to be coming down with something. His reaction times were slow and I caught him stumbling a few times. Honestly, I was getting worried. We were heading the wrong way to get medical care. Before I could get too worried, though, everything came to a head.

In the late afternoon of the third day, we came to a rocky hillside and Nate announced "OK, we're here."

"Where the hell is 'here'?" I had to ask. My last hit of Jet had been a little strong, and I was still dealing with some time dilation and light headedness, but even in that state of mind I could tell there was nothing here. I looked around, feeling more and more irritated. The clouds overhead had been looming all day, but thankfully no rain. Yet. Still, Nate had dragged me all the way out here for what? Climbing a little rise in front of me, I realized that just over the ridge we had been behind was a huge hole, going down into the earth. Some sort of quarry, maybe. A beat up sign, faded over the decades, proclaimed D NW CH B RE S, whatever company name had been there lost to the rain and wind. The lingering smell of rotten flesh hung over this place and I could see dead raiders strewn around, but these corpses were old, at least a few months. Nobody was here. "Where the hell have you brought me? Something killed all these raiders, and I'd rather not run into whatever that something is, if you feel me."

Nate chuckled mirthlessly. "You already have. I'm something. Valentine and I cleared this place months ago." I was surprised. I didn't even know that he and Valentine had traveled together much, let alone out here. "It's where I got this." He patted the sword, and it seemed to shimmer greasily in the grey overcast light.

"You and Nickleface cleared all this?" I asked queasily. Looking around, down in the hole, I could see a ruined suit of power armor upside down, remains of the driver still hanging there inside. "Pretty impressive. Didn't know the old synth had it in him." I'm a ghoul; I don't get creeped out very easily, for obvious reasons. I've also been mayor of a town full of sociopaths, junkies and general weirdos for years. I've talked and bullshitted and fought my way through Gunners, Atomheads, raiders, junkies, drunks, you name it. But something about this place went way down inside me to the part that used to be a little human kid and said 'you shouldn't be here'. I'd rather take a bath in Swan's Pond than go down in that hole. And of course, where was Nate headed? The stairs.

"Come on, we've still got a ways to go." He started down the rickety old mine stairs, ignoring how the staples set in the stone walls groaned under his weight.

"OK, hold up." I said. "Just what the fuck are we doing here? Why are you going down there? What is this place anyway? I have a lot of respect for you, and we've had some good times, man, but I need an explanation. This place is seriously off." I hoped like hell he would listen. I wasn't the sort to just abandon a friend in a place like this, but... well, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about it. I didn't have human skin any more, but if I could have been goosepimpled, I would have. Hell, I didn't have tear ducts any more either, but that didn't stop me from occasionally wanting to shed a tear, especially when I was out of something I wanted.

Nate sighed, like I was just being difficult for shits and giggles. "We have to go in." When he could see that this half-assed 'explanation' wasn't getting any traction with me, he expanded on it. "Remember in the bar, when we were talking? And I asked you if you would do it, if there was a way to stop the fighting? Remember? And you said 'yeah, whatever you need me to do, I can do it'? Remember that?" Fuck me, I did remember that. I didn't expect him to, though. What had I signed myself up for, anyway? "Well I need you to do this. Together we're going to fix this mess I made." His face was stern, but his eyes looked... crazy and sad. Not for the first time, I began to wonder exactly what was wrong with him, that this 'medicine' he was making and taking was supposed to fix. He looked bad, dark circles under his eyes, skin kind of greyish, not rad sickness but similar.

"So... you mean there's some sort of weapon down there? Something you can use to keep the groups in line, some sort of, what, doomsday device? Man, that sounds like some comic book shit if I ever heard it." Please don't make me do this, Nate. I will if you make me, but I don't want to. At all.

"Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. It's not exactly a weapon, but... yeah." Nate's eyes glittered. "So come on. Let's go fix the world, Hancock."

Shit. Shit shit shitty shit. "I... OK, Nate. Don't ever say I didn't do something stupid for you out of trust. Let's go." As we walked, I basically recited every curse word I knew in my mind, backwards and forwards, stringing them together and alternating the order, making more and more elaborate constructions out of them, trying to come up with some combination of the language of disgust and rage and misery that could express how I felt about going into this giant terrifying hole in the world. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. It was a standard sheet of plywood painted blue, but as far as my nerves went, it might as well have had a sign over it saying "ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE". Inside was even worse. The smell of rot was trapped here, so it was stronger. Nate and Nick had left the raiders wherever they fell, so badly rotted corpses were strewn randomly around the place. No animals could reach them here, so the bones were all together; the only sign of hope was that there weren't any ferals either, because the corpses would have been chewed.

Nate led us down into Hell. Further and further, air getting stale even ignoring the stench of decay, we clambered down old mine shafts. I was seriously questioning the sanity of both people on this expedition. Him for coming, me for accompanying him. Nowhere in my mandate of friend and occasional fuckbuddy did the phrase "follow you into hell" occur. I should know, I wrote it. Or thought it. Something like that. Anyway, this was a bad place to be, you feel me?

We finally reached the bottom of the main shaft, after a brief scare on a rickety catwalk. I looked around at all the equipment, wondering which one was the magic bullet device, when Nate went over and opened yet another door, this one clearly marked by the chains that lay all around it. All I could say was "Are you fucking kidding me?" Nate didn't respond, just beckoned for me to follow and set off into the dark hallway like he was perfectly at home. By this point, my willies had the willies. Every little creak and groan made me want to crawl out of my ruined skin. I might be a ghoul, but I wasn't ready to be in a place like this. I thought long and hard about just turning around, climbing back out of here, and saying "the hell with this." I wanted to very badly indeed. I was about to do just that when suddenly, Nate's head popped back out of the door.'

"Hancock, come on. Just a little further." He sounded more like himself. I can't explain it. There was a caring sound, that had been missing for days, a tone that said he was thinking of me as a friend again. "I didn't remember how far down it was. Sorry." He even apologized! I shook off my fears and followed him in. It was just as bad as I feared. More twisty little passages, these full of dead ferals instead of raiders. In this part there were strange sounds, not the normal creepy underground sounds from the main mine area, but extra creepy ones. Muffled sounds of talking in the distance, shuffling steps, and once chanting that made my nonexistent hair stand straight up. This was a Bad Place, full stop. Little boy Hancock was getting louder and louder in my mind, telling me that I needed to runrightnow and get the hell out. I followed the bobbing greenish light of the Pip-Boy, deeper into this apparently bottomless hole in the ground. 

Finally we came out into a room with a pool of greasy, turgid water slopping in the center of it and nothing else. No secret weapon, no government lab, no wall of switches and dials. Just a flat floor with weird scratches on it that almost seemed to make symbols, a few ruined stools, and the pool. That was it. There was a strange smell here, different than the rest of the mines. Not decay exactly, but... it clicked. It smelled like the herbal medicine that Nate had been taking. I turned and was astonished to see him unpacking his bag, hauling out those books, candles, jars of powder and a collection of bizarre items that looked like he had raided the old Witchcraft museum. I realized, as my stomach sank through my feet, that Nate had lost his mind at some point and I had apparently not noticed. "Nate..." I said softly. He closed the door behind himself closing us in, a door I hadn't even noticed, and drew a symbol on it with chalk.

"Give me a minute." He said, like nothing unusual was going on. I watched, horrified, as he found a low wooden table and set it up next to the pool, setting his sword on it and some candles, then started tracing diagrams on the floor using powders from his bag. This was lunacy way beyond anything I'd seen, even in Goodneighbor. I noticed uneasily that the diagrams he was tracing matched the grooves in the floor exactly. I knew Valentine would never have been willing to put up with anything like this, so... clearly Nate wasn't the first. I took a grape mentat again, not only for the comfort, but because I needed to be as charming as I could possibly be. 

"Nate," I started again. "What are you doing? Where's this secret weapon thing? Come on, man, let's go. This is crazy." I didn't think that was the right approach to take, but what do you say in this circumstance? Hey, buddy, looks like you've gone completely over the edge and are trying to do some weird ritual in the bottom of the scariest mine anyone has ever seen because... what?

"He's here." Came the reply. Hoo boy. "He's always been here. Just waiting." Nate finished the first diagram. He looked at it, nodded, then switched jars and started on the second. This was a small one, quickly finished, and another jar swap began the third. "He can get them to stop fighting. And none of them can hurt him, so he can bring peace."

"Who?"

"Ug-Qualtoth." Nate was seriously starting to scare me now. I don't know that name, but as far as comfort levels go, that inspired something on the level of 'glowing deathclaw'. But more to the point, Nate thinks there's someone or something down here that can... hoo boy. I liked Nate. A lot. Not love exactly, but... I didn't want to lose him. Certainly not like this. But I also knew when I was in over my head with crazy, and this was way, way, wayyyy over my head. Like, deeper than that pool of scary water over my head. I made the executive decision that I would deal with this like I dealt with most tragedies in my life, by running away. Add this to my list of regrets, but now it's time to go. I went and tried to open the door, but it was like it was glued shut. Nate looked up, concerned. "Hancock, you can't leave. I need you here." His face grew sad. "Nobody else can do it."

"Do what?" Now I was seriously freaked out. Had he superglued the door? Were we both... we were. We were both going to die. Down here. In all the times I wondered idly how I was going to end, I had to admit, this wasn't even on the list of guesses.

"The last step. You'll see." His face was pale and set. "And... I'm sorry. I won't get a chance to say it once I start, but... I'm sorry that it had to be you. We didn't talk about it much, but... I enjoyed what we had together. A lot. Maybe I wasn't as honest as I should be, with you or with myself. I had feelings for... well. Put it this way. If I didn't care about you a lot, this wouldn't work. For whatever that's worth." What the hell did any of that mean? Did this asshole seriously bring me to hell to talk about his feelings? Wait, talk about his feelings in the past tense? My stomach went beyond my boots and into the ground itself. "This has to be done. It's the only way. I see that now. I'll miss you." I worried that Nate was going to start a villain's monologue, this was some comic book level craziness. "Guess I'll get started."

"Nate! Stop this! I..." my voice just... cut off. I could feel my mouth moving, but I wasn't making any sound. Nate gave me a sympathetic look, but stood in front of the table and turned back to the pool. He bowed his head and I heard him say "Ug-Qualtoth. I accept your offer. I, Nathaniel Acosta de Leon Alvarez, offer myself to you, through the hand of one who was dear to me, to open the way for you. A new one to offer, an old one to be offered, the oldest one to receive. Let the threefold sacrifice be made, to bring peace to the world at war. What was, will be; what will be, was. Let the way be opened anew, and you shall arise. _Ph'thui or'gnafl sh'goth_..." His voice got weird and bendy. I had never heard this language, but the echoes were distorted and weird. Lights started rising out of the pool, like fireflies but kind of sickly green, swirling around the room. Even in my weirdest trips, even when I took some of the strongest chems known to man, I had never seen any shit like this. I wondered briefly if this was just a trip, if I would wake up in the bottom of Starlight Drive-In, shake my head, laugh and go on with life. I really hoped so. This would be a great time for that to happen. The diagrams on the floor were glowing in different colors, and the one that caught my attention the most was a reddish orange color, and seemed to mark a path from where I was standing to the table where Nate was standing, still chanting.

Suddenly I could see other people in the room. There was a group of people in mining clothes here, all standing chanting the same sounds. There was a group of people in robes here, overlaid on the miners, chanting the same sounds. There was a group of people in clothes like I had never seen here, chanting the same sounds. There was a group of... oh Jesus. What were those? Mirelurk kings? Fish people? All of them were chanting the same sounds, overlaid on each other. As the sound continued to echo through the room, I realized that Nate had stopped. He knelt down, head over the pool like he was looking into it, down into the depths. His hand came up and beckoned me forward, though he was moving oddly, like he wasn't really himself. Of course, since we were here, it didn't look like he had been himself for a long time. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't make a sound.

I thought to myself, no fucking way am I moving. I'm not going anywhere. And then my feet stepped out and carried me forward. My body felt like I was caught in a riptide; no matter what I did I was pulled inexorably forward, towards Nate where he stood, leaning over the pool. I fought against it as much as I could, struggling to stop, even fall over, but my body marched on without my control, picking up the disgusting distorted sword from the table, greasy filthy hilt in my hand, touching it to his chest, then each shoulder, I won't no no no I won't I can't I won't no my arm stop it stop it

And my arm cut his head off, and it fell in the pool.

The room shook. It struck me at that moment, ridiculously, that I loved him more than I ever admitted to myself. I never let myself love him. I'd always have tomorrow, he'd always be around, and I wouldn't have to make myself vulnerable. I wouldn't have to admit that I cared, wouldn't have to see his face when I told him, wouldn't have to risk rejection. And here I was, pathetic, controlled by something I didn't even believed existed, having killed the one thing that made my life bearable. The sound of laughter, horrible inhuman laughter, came from everywhere. I still had that ridiculous sword in my hand, and wondered if I could turn it on myself. Maybe, as sharp as it was, I could kill myself with it and go join Nate. An unbelievable stench came from the pool and the water seemed to be boiling. Nate's headless body started to stand up, and I realized that I had now gone just as crazy as he had been. If this was a trip, I was stuck in the hallucinations. Nate's body reached into the water of the pool and fished out his head, holding it to the neck stump. His voice came from it, sounding like him, but clearly not.

"You have done me a great service, child of the new dawn." Child of the what? "This one was strong enough to make the offering. None of the others were." The body stumbled around, with whatever was moving it clearly not fully in control of it yet. The head looked at me, smiling, with my dead lover's face. I realized it was set slightly crookedly on the neck of the body. "You will be my priest, and I will raise you above the kings of the earth. All will bow." Whatever Ug-Qualtoth was didn't sound very peaceful to me. Like he was hearing my thoughts, he continued "Peace will come to what is left of man, peace in the service of We Who Rule. I must awaken my kin." A terrible snorting laugh. "Nyarlathotep will be furious that I came without his help. In his pyramid he will stay. Forgotten." 

I slumped at the apparent pettiness of this supposed god. Wait, slumped? I was free of the compulsion. Not even taking a moment to think, I swung the sword as hard as I could and beheaded my lover again. The sword broke with a ringing sound, pieces raining down on the stone floor. I didn't know what to expect, and honestly, I didn't expect it to work. Maybe an explosion, maybe to be set on fire, maybe the roof would fall in? But none of that... just a scream, fading quickly, and then the lights went out. All the glowing lights from the pool vanished; all the candles were extinguished. It was as black as death, and that was fine. Maybe I was already dead. 

After a minute, I crawled over to where I thought Nate's body was. I found it and took his Pip-Boy. Turning on the light, the door was a shattered ruin. I left that horrible place. I don't know how long it took me to finally drag myself, gasping, out of that terrible hole in the ground. By the time I finally climbed the last set of stairs, I could see flashes in the distance illuminating the night sky. While we were down there, the new war had begun.


End file.
